Ubuntu Sway Remix is an unofficial flavor of Ubuntu that uses Sway, a lightweight, tiling, and Wayland-compatible window manager renowned for its efficiency and minimal resource usage.
The distro is tailored for users who value minimalism and control, facilitated largely through keyboard commands. Today, the distro’s developers released Ubuntu Sway Remix 24.04, built upon the foundation of Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat,” so, let’s see what’s new.
Key Features of Ubuntu Sway Remix 24.04
The main highlight of the release is Sway 1.9, enhancing the window manager with full support for fractional scaling. This improvement is a boon for high-resolution displays, allowing for finer adjustments to the interface scale, thus making everything from text to icons clearer and more accessible.
Thoughtful updates have also been made to hardware interaction. The new version introduces a way to restore specified keyboard backlight settings automatically after waking from sleep. Adjusting screen brightness has also become more intuitive and precise, thanks to replacing the older light command with brightnessctl.
Addressing user feedback, the default setting now disables the screen saver during installation processes—particularly beneficial on slower drives where system sleep could interrupt setup operations.
The integration of the Qt6 version of the Kvantum style engine greatly improves visual consistency across applications, ensuring that apps using Qt6 libraries seamlessly match the system’s overall look.
Moreover, to streamline the user interface, desktop help for hotkeys is now off by default, reducing on-screen clutter. Those who depend on keyboard shortcuts can easily reactivate this help via a new button on the Waybar.
Software management in Ubuntu Sway Remix 24.04 also sees a major upgrade. GNOME Software replaces gnome-packagekit, offering a more user-friendly way to manage app installations and updates. Additionally, the updated Sway Input Configurator now stands at version 1.4.1, further refining the customization of input devices to enhance user interaction.
It should also be noted that the distro comes with many useful pre-installed software, such as LibreOffice 24.2.3 Office Suite, Transmission 4.0.5 BitTorrent Client, Thunderbird 115.12 E-mail Client, mpv 0.37 Media Player, NeoVim 0.9.5 Terminal Text Editor, and others.
Lastly, we’ll just add that the release has completely removed the Ubuntu-specific Snap format, which, depending on your preference, can be seen as an advantage or a disadvantage.
Refer to the announcement for detailed information about all changes. Ubuntu Sway Remix 24.04 “Noble Numbat” is available for download as an ISO file from the official website for x86-64 and Raspberry Pi devices.
